These whiners need to get used to the fact that they are no longer going to be able to line their pockets by fleecing the tax-payer and exploiting their workers.

Meanwhile...

• Insurance companies can't deny you coverage for a pre-existing condition.• Women can’t be charged 150 percent more than men for insurance, can’t be penalized for having had a C-section—and can count birth control as preventive care. • For North Carolinians and other Americans who already have health insurance at work or buy it themselves, Obamacare requires new benefits from – and creates new rules for – insurance companies that make coverage more secure and comprehensive. (Courtesy of the News & Observer.)• Young adults can now stay on their parents’ health insurance plans until they are 26.•Insurance companies can no longer impose lifetime limits on coverage and, as of 2014, they will no longer be allowed to set annual coverage limits. The end of these caps will provide critical financial relief for families who face catastrophic medical bills.• Obamacare requires insurance companies to spend 80 to 85 percent of all the premium dollars they collect on medical care services and quality improvements – not on administrative costs.• The Medicare "doughnut hole" (created by your boy Bush) is closed.•Under the act, North Carolina seniors on Medicare now get a free annual wellness checkup. They also receive free preventive screenings for cancer, high cholesterol and other potential problems.• Once the Affordable Care Act—otherwise known as Obamacare—is fully implemented, about 8.7 million women will have guaranteed access to maternity and newborn care in all new individual and small group plans. (Which, by the way, would go a loooooong way toward addressing the US' abysmal infant mortality rate. You do care about sick and dying babies, don't you?)

And finally, according to the Congressional Budget Office....

• The Affordable Care Act will lower the budget deficit by $143 billion over the next 10 years by raising some taxes and shifting more cost burdens.

You morons can keep trying to spin all this as if it's a bad thing if you want to. But you should know that the rest of the civilized world is ROTFLMAO at you.

dwain, look closer. Only two links were to Fox. One was a link to "Blackenterprise.com". Doubt if they are real strong into Fox. As a "conservative", I have discovered that if I want to know what I believe, what I think, and what I listen too, all I have to do is ask a "liberal", they know more about me than I do. Here in NC, since election day, over 2,000 jobs have disappeared, or will disappear in the next few moths. Would be easy to blame the President, but I will hold off judgement. Hopefully we aren't going to "double-dip" like Europe seems "hell bent" on doing. Europe seems to keep making the same economic mistake over and over. You have heard the definition of "insanity", haven't you? That appears to apply to Europe.

AM I a "corporate raider's lapdog"? Excuse me, whining lap-dog. At present, I have NO Healthcare Insurance. PPACA does me ABSOLUTELY no good after working over 40 years, paying tax 40 years, supporting the government 40 years, helping pay for welfare and food stamps for 40 years, and I DO REALIZE THERE ARE MILLIONS OF PEOPLE, ESPECIALLY CHILDREN WHO WOULD SUFFER WITHOUT THESE PROGRAMS, I have no problem with them, and after serving for 4 years in the US military. At present I am using VA healthcare, without which, I would have NOTHING. Because of the backlog and looonnggg waits at the VA clinic if I need to see a physician, I go to a "walk-in clinic", of which there are none in Lexington, and pay out of pocket. (I'm just thankful I can afford to have "simple illnesses" treated out-of pocket". (Last case was an ear infection)PPACA was passed in March of 2010, why wait until 2014 to start it, although I have heard some people are already getting benefits. I have not been able to substantiate this, so I don't know if it is true or not. Please excuse me if I sound a little bitter, not as bitter as I sound.

First: I'd like to think that you know me better than that. While I might assume that there have been times in your life that you (as I) may have indeed been a "dog," I would never assume that the breed to be that of the lap variety. Big or bad, perhaps. But not lap. (I was talkin' about FOB.)

Second: Thank you for your service.

Third: I'm with you on VA care. While not always convenient, it's a life-saver for many. If not for the VA, my family might well have been bankrupt a few years back. Because of complications during my Dad's chemo, he required a blood-thinner medication that cost $1,000 a week on the open market.

Fourth: I'd say you have every reason to sound even more bitter than you do. You've been a life-long, contributing member of society. Why is it that we have overcome so many obstacles just to stay healthy?

And to that, I'd add that you're lucky you have the VA to fall back on. What about the folks that contributed to our society in ways other than the military? Do you actually know anybody that's about to retire with a pension? (Remember those?)

The labor market is not what it was when Nixon crafted the employer coverage arrangement, and neither is the healthcare industry.

In my mind, Obamacare was a great big gift to the insurance industry - but still a step in the right direction.

Yet I doubt that we're still a ways off from being grownup enough (as a nation) to begin to take a serious look at how to keep our citizens healthy for less money.

Other nations do it (there's no denying the numbers of per-capita coverage), but we (for some reason) seem to be wedded to the concept that there must be a profit motive in healthcare (the insurance game).

Dwain, the only problem being, will PPACA work as it should? You know how government programs tend to work. (or not) I'm not really bitter, I just tend to "go with the flow most times. I don't call it Obamacare because I doubt if the Pres. really had time to write 2100 pages of gobbledegook. (He was too busy playing golf.) Later, Gator.

Yauponsurfer wrote:One was a link to "Blackenterprise.com". Doubt if they are real strong into Fox.

2. Good burn. Yauponsurfer 1, Dwain 0

Yauponsurfer wrote:As a "conservative", I have discovered that if I want to know what I believe, what I think, and what I listen too, all I have to do is ask a "liberal", they know more about me than I do.

3. Another good burn. Yauponsurfer 2, Dwain still 0

4. Bush is not my boy nor am I his father.

5. In choosing between Fox and the daily show BS, Fox, or any other network, would be chosen before the daily show BS is watched.

6. Another one of Dwain's MANY problems: He would rather participate in infantile name-calling like moron and lap-dog than to have a real civil conversation.

To the sore losers who are either completely catatonic, or totally engaged in their psychotic episodes today, and who may switch places tomorrow: Obamacare covers all the lithium, respiradone, and Abilify that you may need to make it through the day, and the valium and ambien you may need to sleep at night.

I think you jumped too fast because you missed the part where Surfer and I had a civil conversation. But I know that doesn't fit into your narrative, so...

And I did look closer at your list of links. Every single one of them.

While you tried to make it look like a veritable poop-storm of badness coming our way, in reality it's just a repetitive list of the same few things.

Items 1 & 2 are the same story. Same with 3 & 4 and 6 & 7. (Item 8 was BS hyperbole from Faux News with no basis in reality whatsoever. Part of its hysteria is the raising of taxes on the middle class and going over the fiscal cliff - brought to us by your friends in the Tea Party.)

So then, items 1 through 4 are about restaurant chains figuring out how to minimize their costs by screwing over their workers. Having spent a few years in the restaurant biz before and during college, all I have to say is "That's news?"

That crap has been going on since we stopped being hunter gatherers and became sedentary: a few exploit the many. (You just now noticing this?)

And I LOVE how you try to blame big business acting like buttholes on the President trying to improve healthcare for workers. They're trying to weasel out of doing the right thing for their staff and somehow it's Obama's fault.

And finally I want to call you out on your unpatriotic, sniveling, cowardly, yellow-bellied, divisive, mocking, disrespectful conflation of the President's name with that of a terrorist that orchestrated the deaths of 3,000 of our fellow citizens.

I don't know if you've heard or not, but Obama was the one that authorized the SEALs to take bin Laden out after your boy Bush "couldn't find him."

Suck it up douche-bag. Like I said, there's a new sheriff in town. Or else join the secession movement (or as MCP labeled it: redneck self-deportation.) You wouldn't be missed.

Either way, social dinosaurs such as yourself are irrelevant. You're already dead. You just don't know it yet.